


Nobody Sails Now

by TheHats



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen, OC, Sailboat, no canon characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-17 12:46:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14189265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHats/pseuds/TheHats
Summary: Someone had to be the very first to see Trespasser.





	Nobody Sails Now

No one sails the oceans anymore.

 

  
There’s good reason. I know there is. Oh boy, do _I_ know there is. And I know it’s hardly the most important thing we’ve lost. I mean, millions of lives, whole cities… But the thing I mourn is sailing. Only the brave and crazy go outside that new wall they’re building, and they only do it for money. Fishing or smuggling in the fastest boats they can wrangle. That’s not sailing. I know sailing. I grew up sailing.   
  
We had an Island Packet 36, a chubby comfortable little sailboat named _Asimov_ , and we moved aboard her when I was seven. I had my own little cabin, just a bunk with a door under the starboard side of the cockpit, with my own little portlight, and my kayak named _Pony_ that we stowed on the cabintop next to Mom and Dad’s. For eight years, we lived on her, sailing mostly around the Pacific, except for a trip to Europe when I was eleven. So like I said, I know sailing. I lived sailing.   
  
And then…   
  
I was fifteen when that all got wrecked. We were making an arc from Hawaii out to Japan, and we were going to go on south to Australia after that. It had been a few foggy days, so we didn’t have any solar, which meant no radio. I don’t know what we’d have heard or done if we’d had it. Maybe we’d have known it was coming. Maybe we wouldn’t. We could have even been the first people to see it, maybe. When I have nightmares about it, it’s about how maybe we could have warned San Francisco if I hadn’t used the last of our battery to pump the bilge the day before, instead of doing it by the hand pump.   
  
It was me on watch, that morning just after dawn. It was still foggy, which means  almost no wind, so I was just fiddling with the drifter to see if I could get it to at least draw enough so that we stopped wallowing, because there was this slow gross swell coming from the Southwest and we were rolling on it like a dead fish. Dad was awake already - I only knew then because I could smell the coffee burning - but Mom was still asleep. So I was standing on the cabintop, and suddenly, there’s this one low swell, moving due East and cutting fast across the rest like a soundwave. It was so weird. I remember thinking that it looked fake, like a special effect right out of Star Wars. It hit us and rolled right past, just jostling us, like a kid pushing through a crown. Made the steering vane joggle around, so I was about to jump down into the cockpit to fix that when the second wave hit us.  
  
This one was a lot bigger, a ten-footer at least, and we rolled up over it like a freighter wake. But it was weird, curved, like a bow wave. I held tight to the boom. I mean, I was wearing my safety harness, but I was still holding on good. I heard everything crash off the counter up in the galley, and Dad swore. Right when he put his head up through the companionway, the thing broke the surface.   
  
I thought at first that it had to be a submarine. This huge, narrow… blade-shape rose up, dark out of the water, in the fog. And it was pushing an enormous wave. Like a wave as tall as our mast, and we didn’t have any engine. It was too close, even if we did. Dad just shouted to hang on, and grabbed my leg, and then that wave crashed into us, and it flung us aside like nothing. Like _nothing_. We rolled onto _Asimov_ ’s side and the sail smacked the water hard, and I was under it, in the water. My safety harness tethered me to the boat, but half the deck was underwater and so was I, face-down in that water. And my eyes were open. And so was another eye, an eye I could see down in the blue, huge and glowing green, and not looking at us at all. And it just… moved on. And Asimov’s ballast did what it was supposed to and pulled her back upright like a weeble-wobble. Everything around us was swirling, disturbed water and foam and floating detritus flung off our deck, and I was dangling over the liferail by my safety harness. And that huge- fin. It was a fin. I could see the rough, scaly skin on it. That huge fin was disappearing off into the fog.  
  
Dad hauled me back inboard while the cockpit drained and I just sat on the sidedeck, hacking up saltwater while he checked on Mom. She was shouting from their cabin with a sound in her voice that terrified me - but it was just her cabin door that was jammed. She was afraid for me - she’d seen me in the water. But she was okay  and Dad was okay and I was almost okay - the boom had hit me hard in the thigh, and I found out I was bleeding when Mom got on deck and scrambled over to check on me. “Safety harness!” I snapped at her, and Dad too. I think we did it in unison. No one was coming on deck without one, not now.  
  
My leg wasn’t hurt too bad. Bruised to the bone and tore up a bit. The drifter was in shreds from the knockdown, but the main was fine, except some of its rigging was snarly. We had to go retrieve all three kayaks, and Dad got into his wetsuit to check the rudder and the prop and the steering vane’s rudder. The prop was out of alignment, but we barely had any fuel on board anyway - we were really surprisingly okay.  
  
For a day, doing repairs and pumping out everywhere water had gotten where it shouldn’t, we just drifted. The fog lifted as a breeze started up, coming from the direction the finned thing had gone. It <i>reeked,</i> but all three of us pretended not to notice. None of us wanted to talk about what we’d seen yet - not until _Asimov_ ’s little world was set right. We opened all the solar panels as soon as the wiring was checked and dry, and the next afternoon, we had radio.  
  
Just in time to hear about the giant monster that was walking ashore that day in San Francisco.   
  
For six days, we kept the radio out by the helm, and all three of us stuck together in the cockpit, listening to the news that was getting passed along from ship to ship. We cheered when we heard about it going down.  
  
But when we put into port in Osaka, and we all got ashore, none of us wanted to go right back out there. Mom and Dad actually sent me to stay with my cousins, in Colorado, when the planes started flying again a week later. They sailed back to the states without me, by the Aleutian route, staying really, really clear of where we saw the thing. Trespasser, everyone was calling it. And then just two months after they got back, the next one hit. And then there were more.  
  
Maybe _Asimov_ is still out there, where we left her, on the hard in that shipyard in Seattle. Seattle didn’t get crushed up too bad. But we never got to go back to find out, and it’s restricted territory now.   
  
And nobody sails anymore.


End file.
